Nearly three-quarters of online shoppers (71 per cent) in the UK will leave a retail website within one to two minutes of not finding the products they are looking for.

The research highlighted that 59 per cent of consumers planned to purchase more products online this Christmas than they did last year, but 31 per cent would not return to a site with poor search capabilities. 59 per cent would only come back if the site had unique items that couldn't be found elsewhere.

The majority of online shoppers (91 per cent) find retail sites through a major search engine, such as Google, Yahoo, MSN or AOL. And, 88 per cent of respondents visit retail websites that they've never heard of simply because those sites rank highly on the major search engines.